Isabel is appalled. It is evident that Boreson and Edetti will stop at no expense or sacrifice to obtain the secret, Boreson to save her sight and her life, Edetti to put his name on the discovery. Isabel excoriates them both for their selfishness, for the perversion of thinking they are entitled to live forever when others of their world and other worlds are hungry and suffering. She cries, “Who would want to stay forever in the womb? Death is the culmination of life. It’s as sacred a transition as birth!” Paolo Edetti responds that long life has always been the privilege of a very few, and that now, it will simply be even longer.
Knowing her objections to their plans, keeping Isabel in quarantine suits Edetti and Boreson. But Isabel has met one friendly face at the Multiplex, the longshoreman Jin-Li Chung, who with her usual curiosity has figured out where the child Oa is being kept, and accordingly, knows that Isabel is there also. Through Jin-Li, Isabel gets word to Simon Edwards, a research physician with the Earth Health and Welfare Coalition. Simon and Isabel did field work together in the Great Victoria Desert of Australia, studying a tribe of aborigines threatened by pollution and vanishing resources, developing strategies for their survival. The physician and the priest shared a passion for music, for literature, and for their work. They fell in love, and Isabel gave in to temptation. Shocked at her weakness and overcome by guilt, she fled back to her Mother House without even saying goodbye. But now, Simon’s expertise in medical research and his ties to powerful figures in the World Government make him the only person she can turn to for help. She has also learned the truth of what is happening on Virimund, although Boreson has tried to suppress it; the geos of ExtraSolar and the now-indigenous Sikassa are at each other’s throats. The survival of the lost colony is at stake.
Oa, the Sikassa child, spends the long solitary hours sifting through her century of memories. Although she is so old, she is still in most ways a child. She has a prodigious memory, as children do, recalling things in great detail, some that happened a very long time ago. But, like a child, she is often unable to synthesize diverse pieces of information. She speaks of herself only in the third person, because Oa, and the other old children, the anchens, know that they are not really persons. Their mythology teaches them that they, the children who never grow up, have no souls, and have no use in their culture. It is this that confuses Isabel when she tries to understand Oa. If the priest asks Oa how old she is, the child holds up her tattooed arms and hangs her head in a posture of submission. If Isabel tries to ask about the day Oa was injured, Oa speaks of the Child Goddess, but is unable to explain what that means. If Isabel asks about Oa’s parents, the child turns her head away and says she has none.
In fact, the day of her rejection from her parents’ home is one of the memories Oa relives. She also remembers the day the geos arrived on the island of the anchens, and she remembers scenes from her childhood such as the day each year when the children receive their naming tattoos. Isabel is a temptation to Oa, a danger, because it’s clear Isabel believes Oa to be a real person. Oa is drawn to the priest, craving her company, longing for her affection and protection, but believing that when Isabel finds out the truth, she too will reject Oa. Oa is convinced that the medicator, which tests her blood constantly, is searching for her soul. She fears the day when it finally determines she has none.
Through Jin-Li, Isabel sends Simon Edwards copies of the medicator readouts for Oa. She is unable to acquire the assessments for the child who died. Simon finds evidence of a small, benign anterior pituitary tumor, and an abundance of telomerase in Oa’s body as well, something normally found in cancerous and reproductive cells. Isabel reads the hardcopy of his message over and over, not just for the information, but because it brings her close, however briefly, to Simon. Jin-Li, characteristically, says nothing about the two of them, but she guesses at their relationship, and wonders at their separation.
Isabel and Oa, confined together in quarantine, grow closer and closer. Isabel tries to explain to Oa who and what she is, what her priesthood means. And at last, after weeks of trying to hide what she perceives to be the truth about herself, Oa confesses to Isabel that she is one of the anchens, the soulless ones. Isabel, shocked and confused, tries to comfort Oa, but realizes she will never understand the Sikassa without traveling to Virimund, to do a classic anthropological study. Whatever is happening in Oa’s body, her culture has developed a mythology, a belief system, to deal with it. To heal Oa, emotionally if not physically, Isabel must understand that system.
At the same time, Gretchen Boreson is growing frantic with impatience. Edetti finally releases Isabel from quarantine, and she demands to be allowed to return with Oa to Virimund. Edetti has determined, with the sophisticated equipment at his disposal in the Multiplex, that Oa has a virus that triggers the development of the pituitary tumor, which in turn produces telomerase. The telomerase inhibits the maturation of her reproductive system, and in fact inhibits all her cells from aging by stopping the shedding of DNA in normal cell division. Edetti is calling it the Delayed Senescence Factor, or DSF. He wants to keep Oa in his control, and to acquire other ‘subjects,’ as he calls the old children, for study. He refuses to allow Oa to leave. Only with Simon’s help, and the threat of exposing his actions to public scrutiny, is Isabel able to free the child, and their transport to Visimund is arranged.
Simon Edwards arrives in Seattle, having determined that the virus in Oa’s body is activated by a co-agent, a spore native to Virimund that is present in her lungs. He warns that he does not yet know the source. Paolo Edetti is furious, and fearful that Simon may win through to the secret of DSF before he does. When the transport leaves Earth for Virimund, both Edetti and Simon are on board. Jin-Li, without alarming Isabel, is keeping an eye on Edetti, believing it possible that Simon is in danger from the ambitious ESC physician. Gretchen Boreson is also on the transport, presumably to oversee the research into the Sikassa, to protect their rights, but in actuality because of her determination to acquire the virus herself.
Throughout the first part of the novel, Oa’s memories provide glimpses into the cruel culture of the Sikassa, the frequent and sudden violence, the anchens exiled, the fertility ceremonies, the lonely and desperate life the old children lead on their island. During the months of the journey, Isabel struggles to understand the context of Oa’s experiences, particularly the event of the tatwaj, the tattooing. Jin-Li observes everything, and begins to compile a record that she hopes may someday qualify her as a Port Force archivist. Isabel and Simon work together to search for the antiviral that could possibly ‘cure’ Oa’s condition, and they debate the ethical ramifications. The long-term effects are subject to conjecture. Isabel struggles also against her feelings for Simon, and her commitment to the Magdalene vows. She and Jin-Li and Simon are all emotionally involved with Oa, sympathetic to the terrible memories she carries, to the uncertain future she faces. They discover in her a merry, playful spirit that has been suffocating under the weight of misfortune that has been her life since her exile, and they have to deal with deeply ambivalent feelings over providing her with the cure she craves, that will allow her to grow up, and eventually to die. Before they reach Virimund, Simon insists on inoculating Isabel, Jin-Li, and himself against the virus.
VIRIMUND
Despite the strictures of ESC’s charters, the geoponics installation is in full swing. The Port Force Administrator on Virimund is a plainspoken man, Oscar Jones, who is nervous about his orders to proceed when he knows of the charter violations ESC is committing. He has tried to keep the geoponics workers away from the Sikassa, but there have been incidents of violence just the same, though no one else has been killed. The geos are developing a hatred of the Sikassa despite his efforts, and he is eager to make peace and forestall a situation of war. No one on Virimund understands the Sikassa any more than they did two years before, when Oa was taken away by Edetti.
Oa’s return to the island of the anchens, with Isabel and Jin-Li, is a strange scene. At l
east thirty children, tattooed, wearing ragged clothes, with tangled hair and dirty faces, watch warily as they land on the beach. Oa, reverting to their patois, explains their presence, but still the children are suspicious, and every one of them carries some sort of weapon. Oa leads Jin-Li and Isabel to the monument at the top of the island’s mountain, the shrine to the Child Goddess, built of painted stones. She explains that the bones of the first anchen lie beneath it, that the girl died trying to protect other old children, and that the anchens believe on the Child Goddess can grant them what they want most—their souls, and the chance to grow up.
Isabel is moved at the sacrificial figure that has become the focus of the anchens’ prayers. She approaches the shrine with respect, and spends a long time kneeling before it, her head bent. She is not praying to the Child Goddess, although the anchens think she is. She is asking her own God for understanding, for wisdom, and for the grace of being able to help these abandoned ones. But her action impresses the anchens, and helps to begin a relationship between the old children and Isabel and Jin-Li.
Isabel’s charge, as a medical anthropologist, is to make sense of the Sikassa culture and how they have dealt with the challenges of life on Virimund, and the strange virus that affects some of the children. She needs to get to know the Sikassa on the other islands, but it’s a dangerous process. The anchens are wary, the Sikassa aggressive and unpredictable. Oa has made this much clear. Isabel spends days finding a way to be accepted on the nearest island where the Sikassa live in their shahtos, their tree houses. Oa is not allowed, but Jin-Li accompanies her, and Isabel is glad not to have to go alone. She feels she is getting close to understanding why the Sikassa reject the anchens. With Jin-Li, she develops a theory that the old children are the antithesis of what the emigrant colony needed to succeed in a time of high mortality and a dwindling gene pool. The anchens are weak, nonproductive, and infertile. The Sikassa developed a mythology around the anchens, a belief that children who do not age are in fact not human, that they are soulless. Isabel and Jin-Li witness the tattoo ceremony, the tatwaj. They have to stand by, idle, as the tattoos are counted, and they see the scene of weeping and sorrow when one boy is judged an anchen. Now they understand any child who accumulates fifteen tattoos without a sign of puberty is judged a useless member of the society, and a possible source of further infection, and is banished from the community. Occasionally a child who is believed to be an anchen comes to a late puberty, and is allowed to return to the community. The anchens believe these cases to be miracles wrought by prayers to the Child Goddess.
Isabel knows she is working under pressure of time, a pressure brought to bear by Gretchen Boreson’s quickly fading sight. In touch with Simon by r-wave, she learns his concern that the virus, if contracted by an adult, could be fatal, that a mature reproductive system would make the pituitary tumor malignant. He has identified the spore that he believes is the co-agent of the virus. He believes it comes from the trees that thickly cover the Sikassa islands. There are very few on the islands the geos and the Port Forcemen are working on, because they specifically chose islands with more open spaces for the hydroponics and aeroponics installations. Working with the practical Port Force Administrator, Oscar Jones, he has inoculated all the ESC employees, just in case. But Gretchen Boreson refuses the antiviral agent, and slips away in a boat, accompanied by Paolo Edetti, to the islands of the Sikassa, with the express intent of acquiring the virus.
Just as Isabel is coping with her final understanding of what the tatwaj is, and why the anchens experience the death of all their hopes of being human beings, adults, of having futures that are meaningful, Gretchen Boreson and Paolo Edetti arrive at the Sikassa islands. When the Sikassa, with their usual volatility, threaten their lives, Edetti reveals a weapon. Isabel, the peacemaker, puts herself between the two ESC people and the Sikassa. Simon, following in another boat with Oscar Jones, walks into the middle of the conflict. When Edetti fires his weapon, with Isabel protecting the Sikassa, Simon throws himself on the other physician, and is killed.
Gretchen Boreson, mad with her need, races up the beach and into the midst of the Sikassa. Bizarrely, they circle her, touching her, breathing on her, even putting their open mouths on her. Isabel, holding Simon’s body, sees this, and cries out to Edetti that the Sikassa are doing their best to infect Boreson. They wait on the beach until Gretchen Boreson returns, dazed, bruised, and triumphant.
By the time they have Boreson in the boat, and Simon’s body, Gretchen Boreson is already feverish. Isabel explains, through her grief, what Simon believed about the virus and a mature adult. She says there is no time to lose if Gretchen Boreson is to survive. Isabel, desolate at the feeling that she has lost Simon twice, insists that she will not abandon Oa, that Simon has sacrificed himself to save the anchens, and she will see his goal through to the end. The group hastens to the anchens’ island, where they pick up Oa, and then back to the Port Force clinic where Simon has the antiviral agent stored.
Oa watches in awe as the medicator is put to work on Boreson. For her, this is a revelation, that the machine should be used on a real person, an adult. She understands that Boreson has contracted the virus, and tells Isabel that it is always fatal in adults. Most of the Sikassa, of course, have antibodies against it, but Boreson, having never been exposed before, and having been so deliberately infected by the Sikassa, is overwhelmed by the illness. The medicator reveals that a fast-growing tumor has already developed on her pituitary, and as Simon Edwards predicted, it’s malignant. When Edetti, convinced at last, gives Gretchen Boreson the antiviral medication, and she begins a slow recovery, Oa is stunned.
Once Simon’s body has been laid to rest, with Isabel performing the funeral mass for him, Oa shocks Isabel by kneeling before her and presenting a heartfelt petition for the antiviral agent to be made available to the anchens.
The decision to do so is one that Jin-Li and Isabel discuss for hours. They are so fond of Oa, and now the other anchens, and they can hardly bear to see them change, to be no longer children. Yet they come to feel, after long consideration, that the anchens must be allowed to grow up if they wish; to make their own decisions about the future. Oa receives the antiviral agent, while the others watch, undecided and confused.
EARTH
Isabel returns to Earth with Oa. She takes the child back with her to the Mother House in Tuscany. Boreson, a changed woman, also returns, to have surgery to remove her tumor. Jin-Li stays with the Sikassa, to complete her archival project, to see the anchens through their recovery, and to offer the Sikassa the antiviral agent developed by Simon, and bearing his name. Edetti, humiliated and frustrated, leaves ExtraSolar to continue his research into DSF, but without much hope.
Oa, at home with Isabel, is overjoyed at the appearance of her first menstrual period. At almost the same moment, they receive word from Seattle that Gretchen Boreson’s sight is completely gone.
The Magdalenes hold a special celebration for Oa in their chapel. Though they always believed in her soul, they make a ceremony of Oa’s own new faith in it, and in herself. They honor the beginning of Oa’s life as a whole person. After the festivities, embracing Isabel, Oa speaks of herself in the first person at last. She swears to return to Virimund, to show the other anchens that she has acquired her soul, is truly growing up, and to offer them the same choice. Isabel bows to her will, releasing the child she has come to love into her own personhood, and her own life’s path.
***
Roberta Gellis
Roberta Gellis has been one of the most successful writers of historical fiction of the last few decades, having published more than forty meticulously researched historical novels since 1965. Most currently Gellis has been writing historical mystery (A Mortal Bane, A Personal Devil, Bone of Contention, and Chains of Folly) and historical fantasy (This Scepter’d Isle, Ill Met By Moonlight, and By Slanderous Tongues). Gellis has been the recipient of many awards, including the Silver and Gold Medal Porgy for historical no
vels from the West Coast Review of Books, the Golden Certificate from Affaire de Coeur, The Romantic Times Award for Best Novel in the Medieval Period (several times) and a Lifetime Achievement Award for Historical Fantasy, and Romance Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
I am not at all certain that I should be included in this anthology of synopses because I am afraid I am singularly inept at writing them. My first two books, Bond of Blood and Knight’s Honor, were sold as completed manuscripts by my first agent. I do not know how she convinced an editor from Doubleday to buy the books, but I never wrote a synopsis for them.
My next books, The Dragon and the Rose and The Sword and the Swan, were also sold as completed manuscripts. Again I have no idea how the editor was “sold” on the manuscripts—but Lyle, God bless him, could sell ice to Eskimos in the middle of an arctic winter. Lyle was a book packager and remained my agent for many years. Synopses may well have been written for The Roselynde Chronicles and the many other historical novels that followed, but I did not write them. The plots of the books were history-driven, and the historical events in their proper order were all the synopses I needed.
When I could no longer sell historical romances because of the heavy historical content of my novels, I switched genres to mythological fantasy. Lyle had died (to my sorrow) and my current agent sold Dazzling Brightness to Kensington on the basis of the first three chapters. I had written a synopsis, but it turned out that my agent had never submitted it with the chapters. I discovered this after the contract was signed because the editor asked for a synopsis.
Since the story was based on the myth of the Rape of Persephone, I suppose the agent felt no synopsis was necessary. However I had written one, so I phoned the agent and asked her why she had not sent it with the chapters. It was so awful, she told me, that she hadn’t dared put it in with the chapters, which were very good.
The Synopsis Treasury Page 26